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Tech

Posts Tagged ‘internet’

I’m sure you’ve all heard the advice. Become an expert in your field, get on LinkedIn, get on networking sites, answer questions, network, participate and start your own blog. Well, perhaps that is good advice, but the last one can be a little more dangerous now. Or, at least if you are a celebrity chaser.

The Telegraph reported on 19 August that “Google reveals blogger’s identity after Vogue model’s ‘skank’ insult”. The blogger, who went by the ever so original “Anonymous”, described Vogue covergirl Liskula Cohen in several unflattering terms. A New York supreme court judge quoted an earlier Virginia ruling that online critics can be held accountable once they cross a certain line.

I’m all for civility online, but the constant eroding of speech on the web is somewhat of a concern to me.

I was reading a job description last week. They wanted someone who was “experienced in Web 3.0”. Say what? Must be a typo. So, imagine my surprise when I see the same ad a few days later in another place. Not sure how you can be “experienced” in something that mostly only exists on paper right now. If you thought “Web 2.0” was nebulous, try explaining “Web 3.0”!

Web 2.0 was a buzzword created by Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media.1 However, the father of the World Wide Web (WWW), Tim Berners-Lee disputes that the term is all hype. He maintains that it is nothing more than what the WWW was intended to do.2

Instead of “Web 3.0”, Berners-Lee sees the future as being a “Semantic Web”.

Web 3.0 and Semantic Web have a few things in common. The goal is to make the web smarter. Right now, computers can search and serve up pages, but to make them truly useful requires input from a human. So, how can computers themselves learn and serve up more meaningful information that requires less human parsing?

Software agents seem to be key. In Berners-Lee’s scenario, the web would be organized into ontologies defined by metadata. Some of the groundwork for this exists with people tagging different web pages and bits of information. Agents would then utilize the metadata to personalize the information. The question is whether or not people will expend the effort for tagging, though.

Another piece to the Web 3.0 puzzle will be a user’s profile. Again, there are some systems that can use input from a user to provide individualized content. However, these current systems are not yet nearly ready for prime time. They don’t truly “learn” yet, and there is a lot of training involved.

What about applications, though? Well, it could be done via mashup, much as some applications do now.3 The API, aggregation, application and client-side services will all need improvements and standardization.4 There have been improvements since Wainwright’s article, but it looks like things need to shake out a lot more yet.

These things do not come without certain implications, though. For example, what if the information in a user’s profile were revealed to people with harmful intent? Would it decrease privacy? Would it make it easier for identity theft? These actually may not be resolved before the technology is in place and in use.